California Italian Studies

The “book of islands” or isolario, a novel form of cartographic book combining maps and narrative-historical chorography that was first invented and initially developed in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, represents an engaging and not yet fully exploited resource for historians of literature and cartography. The genre’s importance derives in particular from the way in which its development reflects the shift from medieval or pre-modern place to early modern and modern space during the age of discovery. In fact, to trace the development and expansion of the isolario genre, “from the Mediterranean to the world,” is to witness a capital example in the history of cartography of what Edward Casey has described as “the remarkable elasticity of scope of the employment of cartographic images.” Masterworks in the genre produced during the High Renaissance, Antonio Pigafetta’s Primo viaggio intorno al mondo (ca. 1525), a first-person account of the Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation of the globe (1519-1522), and Benedetto Bordone’s Libro . . . nel qual si ragiona de tutte l’Isole del mondo (Venice: Zoppino, 1528), an encyclopedic print compilation of maps of “all the islands of the world,” together mark a watershed in the early modern history of space at the intersections of chorography and geography, of literature and cartography.